It is not sufficient for a brand to keep talking about itself. It is important that people not only get to know your brand, but also like your brand, and ultimately start trusting it.

In the online world, the constraint is not space but attention. Engagement is a convincing measure of this attention. Engagement humanizes a brand; it inspires trust, loyalty and emotions. It increases reach; and makes your brand memorable.

Engagement metrics are the true indication of how your digital audience feels about your brand. Our top picks for Engagement metrics are:

Website behavior - What is the behavior of your audience when they come to your site? Do they spend time on it? Do they go through several pages? Or do they leave your site before you can so much as say the word ‘engagement’? The three metrics we recommend tracking to evaluate the interest and involvement of your audience with the content shared on your website are:

Time Spent on Site

Bounce Rate

Number of Page Views

Social engagement - While ‘Likes’ on social media are a light indicator of whether the content is resonating with the audience, Shares (Retweets, Favorites), Followers and Comments are excellent metrics of brand engagement. These are all available in the reports from all the popular social media platforms.

Emailer metrics - Do your audience find the content you share on those painstakingly curated mailers interesting? How many of them are even opening the mail? What percentage of them are clicking on the content? Open Rate and Click-Through-Rate are metrics provided handily by almost every e-mail platform. We highly recommend studying these to understand the engagement of your audience with your brand’s email content.

The bottom line: Numbers could be a marketer’s best friend; they will speak the truth, and only the truth. If you use them right, they will give you enormous comfort too!

Do you have any best practices to share on the audience engagement metrics that have worked for you, and become your best friend?

To make all this easier for you, my awesome team has come up with this super cool and easy-to-use sheet that not only gives you the world of metrics you can start tracking, but also tells you where to find them in your reports.